I want to take this opportunity to thank everyone for a wonderful 2010. The support you have shown me and the blog through comments, tweets, emails and tuning into the weekly Signalnoise Broadcasts has been tremendous and overwhelming. Thank-you so much, lets make 2011 an inspiring and creative year all around.

For this design I wanted to do something inspired by the many cool VHS covers I remember from my childhood. Something fun, cool and over the top. This hearkens back to the likes of Mad Max, where anti-heroes rule the desolate highways. In this case, a leather-clad motorcycle warrior with chains and hooks as his weapons of choice. All of the credits are phony, I assure you Jason Eisener and his film company aren’t making this one. :)

After posting about the Black Swan posters recently, here is a great poster for yet another Natalie Portman film, The Other Woman. After riffing on lame movie posters for a while I’m feeling the need to call attention to the nice posters when they appear, such as this one. Great use of tone, typography, wonderful watercolor textures and I really enjoy the unfinished city in the background. Looks like this poster was ripped out of someone’s sketchbook, which is really cool.

Related to the previous post about the Black Swan posters, I’d now like to feature the studio that created them, London UK-based La Boca Design. I had to do a bit of online research to find out who designed those posters, but am very happy to have come across La Boca.

The images I plucked are primarily their CD work, full of vibrant colors and wonderful vintage illustration. I’ve seen a few of these sporadically online over the past while, and it’s always nice to find the people responsible. While their overall designs may be simplistic, the troops over at La Boca use wonderful shading and texture work to add nice depth to their work.

The movie posters for Darren Aronofsky’s new film Black Swan have been a pretty impressive run. I came across the topmost posters a few months ago, struck by the classic sensibility of the colors and illustration. These posters emerged online when I hadn’t a clue about the movie or what it was about, but it instantly had my attention. Even the new posters sporting Natalie Portman’s face are done well, creating a sense of unease which I hear is a main theme of the film.

But let’s talk about teaser posters for a moment. I’ve done some riffing on Hollywood for consistently messing up modern movie posters and I’d like to use Black Swan to support my argument. Marketing of films are angled toward whoever has the starring role, this is painfully obvious. But teaser posters are a different breed of marketing. As I said earlier, I was instantly intrigued by Black Swan upon seeing those teasers above, so much so that I kept it on my radar as the trailer was released and everything ramped up. That is exactly what a teaser poster should do, create interest. Those posters are beautiful, mysterious, atmospheric and above all, different!

I’m confident in saying that if those posters weren’t released I probably wouldn’t have cared enough to watch for this movie. And I certainly wouldn’t be writing this right now.

So Hollywood, please take a few notes from Aronofsky on this one. If you claim the official poster of whatever movie should have a big picture of Tom Cruise’s face, then fine. But why not explore alternative styles, designs and creative for the teasers in order to garner the interest of folks outside of the lead actor’s fanbase? It worked in my case.

Since we’re into the final week before the big day and people will be taking off for vacation soon, I wanted to take this opportunity to wish you all the very best over the holidays. Hope you have a safe and happy one.

Just a note, things might get a little slow on the blog after I head home for the holidays. There will be no Signalnoise Broadcast this week, I’ll be returning at the regular time on Thursday, December 30th.

In a world where modern film posters for the most part give us designers a sinking feeling, we thankfully have guys like Olly Moss out there. So much can be said about these beautiful re-imaginings of the best film trilogy out there, don’t even know where to start. Olly treated Star Wars with care and respect while breathing his own unique and clever vision in the designs.

According to Mondo, these posters will be for sale this Monday, December 20th at a limited run of 400 prints each. These will probably be gone faster then the Falcon can make the Kessel Run.

Last week while I was in Vancouver I decided to do a special little project leading up to the release of Disney’s Tron Legacy film, at least the project was “little” when I first thought of it. For the final 9 days before the film hits theaters I would design a Tron style number counting down and release one each morning. I’ve never done a project before where a daily release was involved so I thought it would be a great exercise, forcing me to spend an hour or 2 each day on personal work. I also worked it into the sequence of designing around the full color spectrum rather then keeping the series limited to the “Tron blue”. It was a real challenge to keep these images unique to one another yet maintaining a bit of diversity.

I started launching the designs at number 9 on the blog and Flickr, and didn’t really tell anyone what I was up to. Readers started catching on when I launched 8 and 7, and by the end had quite a lot of people waiting for the new number each day. You can see the entire series on my Behance as well.

I’ve been getting a lot of questions about what I will be doing with these numbers, something I am still not sure about. They would make nice mini posters, postcards, or I could even print them up full size as they are designed at 18″ x 24″. If you have any suggestions about getting these out there, by all means drop a comment.

For those of you who missed the live broadcast, here is the recorded version of Signalnoise Broadcast 34. For the third week in a row I busted out Photoshop and showed the viewers how I created a couple of my recent Tron countdown images. I managed to design 9 of these things over the past week and it was great to show everyone how I did these with “quick and dirty” effects. We then moved into a QA session where I answered questions from the audience about process stuff and personal projects. It was a wicked time.

Since next week is right before Christmas and a lot of people will probably be away from their offices, I might postpone my next Broadcast and go live on December 30 for a ‘holiday special’. I’ll be sure to announce on my Twitter what the scoop is. Hope to see you there.